One minor but long-standing problem with the front yard was a slightly
low spot sort of near the end of the driveway, which would puddle up a
bit in heavier rain and probably contributed to the March snow-melt
water retention that would always turn the outer part of the driveway into
a mud pit for a couple of weeks. I had already added a couple of inches
of fill across the area, but this didn't really fix anything and what
I really wanted to do was simply get rid of the water more effectively.
Inspired, no doubt, by seeing the massive drainage and infiltration
structures get installed during the
road upgrade job earlier
in the season, I believed I now knew to solve this little problem.
The drainage pits for the two gutter downspouts had been working well, but were allowed to simply overflow a little when they got full -- their purpose was to serve more like splash blocks rather than true infiltration areas, but had been doing fine for both functions in lighter rainfall. Here the water would have nowhere else to go but down, so I needed to construct something to connect the low spot above grade to the more permeable subsoil. As I had seen the fairly clear difference between topsoil and subsoil while digging the downspout pits, I surmised that an appropriately placed column of free-flowing drainage stone might do the trick. It was time to go play in the dirt again! |
Soak it
Apres dig, le deluge
I knew my little hose test was likely not anywhere near real-life "hundred year event" flood conditions, but just a few days later it began to look like I might get my answer soon. Another "polar vortex" jet-stream event was pushing a big cold mass down into the whole eastern half of the US, giving rise to all kinds of flood warnings because it was creating a sharp boundary against some warm and humid conditions that had been there before. The moving pattern was quite obvious on national radar the morning before the storms arrived, and they were saying the Northeast was going to potentially get walloped pretty hard. It didn't look like so much on the national scale, but the thin line of turmoil was already spawning some pretty serious squalls in Texas and elsewhere. |
Mitigation and the Melt
Soon after this page was originally created, the driveway got completely
redone with a permeable-pavers job. Story is here.
This would pretty much mitigate the spring mud-pit issues, but the fact
remained that the low spot in the front yard still needed to drain to
somewhere so the pit would continue to serve a useful function.
Fast-forward to the Great Snowy Winter of 2015, with its seemingly endless digging-out and ice-busting. The key thing was that it stayed very cold for quite a while, which had some interesting effects. At one point in early March I shoveled a short path from the driveway and dug out the area over the pit, thinking that it might be worth being able to watch the effects of the Big Melt which *had* to come along sometime. |